"Call yourself an atom, if you like, Archie," she said, quite hurt, "but leave me out of it. I hate always being looked upon as an atom and I can't endure scientists. Even if we are very petty and unimportant and mere cogs in the wheel, we don't realize it. And if we did realize it, then we should just submit quietly to be ground down and pulverized. I won't be pulverized just yet. And all on account of cook, too!"
But there was no doubt at all about it. Our enthusiasm was waning, and though we still decided to play the farce for a time longer, our effort was half-hearted. We realized the gaunt impossibility of the thing. We studied the life that was lived around us—the bleak, inhospitable holes that apparently refined people called home; nooks with chairs and tables in them, ornate, and decorated, but devoid of the subtile quality known as atmosphere; crannies where the married he and she hid their discomforts, and turned a brave front to the world; cold and dismal recesses where the casual visitor was offered a glass of ice-water, and where old-fashioned hospitality was as dead as a doornail; houses, in which, except on state occasions and amid sickening ceremony, bread was never broken, and conviviality unknown; barren kennels, unkempt cages, stark nests, cheerless dormitories! Home, in New York, had gone to the dogs, impelled thither by cook!
"Last week," said Letitia, "Mrs. Archer gave a reception. She hired two colored girls and one man for the occasion. There was a whole line of carriages in the street. It was a very nice affair. Mrs. Archer received her guests in a lovely blue silk dress. There were sandwiches tied up with ribbons, delicious paté de foie gras, bouillon en tasse, ices, champagne, and all the rest of it. There was music and altogether a most pleasing time. We all enjoyed it immensely. Two days later I dropped into Mrs. Archer's in the afternoon. I was dead tired—almost fainting for a cup of tea. I found her in a dirty cotton wrapper, dusting the pictures, and looking odious. I hinted for tea, but it was no good. She had no servant. At last, in desperation, I asked for a sip of water, and she ran and brought it for me—in a teacup!"
"A cup of tea is certainly not too much to expect," I murmured meditatively.
"The poorest artisan's wife, with seventeen children, and three rooms, could afford a cup of tea," declared Letitia, in pained tones; "but a cup of tea suggests home, you know. Hospitality suggests home. People here have lost the knack of it. These bedizened Jezebels of the intelligence offices have smashed the idea to pieces. One has to set a day for the visitor, and prepare for it two weeks beforehand."
"It must be true," I declared. "People don't drop in to dinner nowadays."
"They can't, because the host and the hostess drop out—to dinner."
It seemed impossible to realize that not so very long ago both Letitia and I had scoffed at the mere idea of the existence of such a thing as the servant question. We had disdained to admit it. We had shut our eyes, and cook had knocked us in the face. We were now as gods knowing good and evil, with more of the latter than the former. Our skittish lives were embittered. The beginning of the end had set in, and the prelude was being played.
Yet we frivoled with a cook or two more. Nobody could possibly accuse us of cowardice. Some may say that we were silly (and to these I simply remark: prove it); but cowardly, we were not. We distinctly warded off the time of surrender. We fought to the last finish, until our cook-mangled bodies gave out in sheer inability to cope with the enigma.